Hey, do you wanna read the first chapter of my web serial??
Fluffles the cat (a sphinx, to be perfectly clear) had died, and the world was worse off for it. Fluffles had brought happiness to his owner, Lee, and had, at best, mildly entertained Lee’s best friend, Ashe, when she was cat sitting. It was through these cat sitting sessions of mild entertainment that Ashe and Lee had met; Lee’s last job in IT would sometimes require her to go to conventions around her state of Oregon, and Ashe, at the time, had been doing odd jobs to make ends meet. Both had since changed their life paths, Ashe now working in a video store and Lee doing in home computer repairs, but Fluffles had been a solid part of their relationship the whole way.
Lee’s house was on the edge of an alright sized highway town called Sisters, and typically sat with only her and Ashe present, but it now had roughly 15 cars in tow. The backyard had fairy lights strung atop the fence casting a warm glow over the entire space, which was filled with metal chairs that Lee had rented from a local party shop. People milled around with small red solo shot cups, and capping each were pieces of plastic wrap that had been sharpied black so that no one could see the contents inside. Ashe and Lee were not standing out in the back with everyone else, but instead in the living room of the house handing out the last of the mysterious plastic shot cups to each guest that entered. The final guest had arrived.
“Lee, I’m so sorry about Fluffles,” mourned a shorter man named Jason, one that the pair had known for years.
“Thanks, dude. Here’s a shot,” Lee responded somberly, reaching out with one of the last cups.
“Most of them are just different sodas, but one of them, I drained all the juice from Fluffles’ favorite food and mixed it together. We have no idea which one, I put it down on a random tray and she shuffled them,” Ashe reported.
“I… Come on. You guys can’t do this to me. You want this because your cat died?”
“It’s what he would have wanted…” Lee stated, her voice quiet, almost hitching. She put the shot glass back on the tray she was holding.
“No it’s not. Are you two even going to do this?”
“Absolutely we are,” Ashe responded, “and this is what Fluffles said he wanted in his final will and testament, ‘Torture my funeral guests just a little bit, but not too much.’”
“Fuck… Fine. For the cat.”
With that, Jason took one of the three final cups and walked away.
Lee turned and whispered quietly, “With his luck, it’s definitely that one.”
Ashe nodded in agreement before the two began walking to the backyard. What followed was a funeral that some might have called, “cobbled together, awkward, and oddly humorous for the dead,” but for Lee, it was a healing experience. Many came up and told light stories about Fluffles; Times when he had thrown up in their shoes, seemingly intentionally; Times when he had thrown up on people’s legs, definitely intentionally; Even times when he had thrown up in attempts to get more dinner. The cat had a vomit problem. Lee told a story about her anxiety, and how Fluffles always knew when she was panicking. After this, there was a steady lowering of a cardboard box into a small grave dug earlier by Ashe, and as it touched the bottom, everyone took the plastic wrap off of their cups and swigged their drinks. In the back left row, Jason lightly gagged.
“Of course it was him,” Ashe mused inside a few hours later, “the guy has biblically bad luck.”
“I feel a little bad, honestly, like. Man could have just had a normal soda, but some divine force just… decided for him that he was gonna get cat food.” Lee was pacing in her kitchen which openly faced into the living room where Ashe sat. “Do you think he knows? Like, that his luck is that bad? On top of that, do you think he’s come to terms with it?” She now spoke far more flatly than with Jason or the crowd of mourners. Whenever she and Ashe were alone, her voice would drift towards monotone, but not completely.
“Do you think, like, it just happens to him? Like, he doesn’t deserve this, he’s a nice guy after all, but the world is just cruel? Or do you think this is punishment for a prior life?” Ashe said tiredly. When she finished speaking, she reached over and drew off of a dab pen that she had sitting on Lee’s living room table.
Lee continued her pacing. “I think an ancestor fucked up. I think a great great gran’ mama grabbed a cursed painting or something and Jason has it hanging in his room, not even knowing that like. Deathrix the luck eater lives in it, getting him, every single night.” Her attention shifted. “Gimme that shit.”
A throw and a catch later, she took an equal pull off of the pen before throwing it back and continuing her steps. The room filled with a comfortable silence for a few minutes, Lee pacing, Ashe laying on the couch on her phone. After some time had passed, a creak came from the house settling and roused Ashe from her web surfing. She looked over to see that Lee had slowed her steps and was deep in thought.
Ashe spoke up with caution. “So. Fluffles, yeah?”
Lee slowed her pacing before saying, “I. Really do not know. I thought I was, but whenever I start to remember him near the end, I just… I start getting choked up.” Her breath shuddered as she drew in a deep breath. “It happened so fast, just last week he was fine, and now he’s gone.”
“You said he just stopped eating?”
“Fuck, yeah. He just stopped eating,” she repeated, almost to herself. “He still played for the first, I dunno, two days, and then he even stopped that. Dude just laid in his bed all day for four days straight, staring at the corner of the room.” She didn’t speak smoothly, but stuttered slightly throughout, trying to find her way through her emotions.
“I’m so sorry, Lee.” Ashe sat up and spoke gently, “Is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all, I really mean it.” Her genuine sound helped.
“I mean, you can’t drive, you’re toasted as shit, so. Spend the night, that would do a lot. Just having company, you know?”
“Also, if you can eat some leftovers,” she added, “that would be great. I made some linguine right before… it happened. Just haven’t had the heart to finish it.”
Ashe looked towards the fridge with bright red eyes, and smiled. “Believe it or not, I think I might be able to help.”
The next morning was quiet and peaceful, but it had a slight disquieting feeling for Ashe. Lee had already moved all of Fluffles things into a cardboard box in the garage so she attributed the feeling to the new sense of space in Lee’s room, but she wasn’t sure if that was the true source. By the time she got to the kitchen for breakfast, she found that she wasn’t hungry, so she instead left to go to work at Glenn’s Video Hut. The drive was only fifteen minutes from Lee’s house and she had left early, so she arrived even before the boss.
With a quick trip to the bathroom, she tended to her messy, ear length brown hair. Ashe hated dealing with the maintenance of the moderate curliness, so she just kept it short and regularly ran her fingers through it to instead keep it wavy. Once that was dealt with, she picked off some hairs (not Fluffles’, clearly (as he was a sphinx cat, not because he was dead, that would be too dark)) from her work outfit consisting of black slacks and a plain gray polo with a shack logo over the heart. A final, quick application of drops to her brown eyes to deal with any remaining redness, and she departed into the main store, where Glenn had finally arrived.
He was a taller man with thinning hair and an equally thin face. He said little to coworkers, but when customers were around he turned into a different man; cheery, bubbly, and with the deepest movie knowledge you could imagine. Ashe got the sense that he wanted a strong life/work balance, and she didn’t blame him even a little. They knew next to nothing about each other, and honestly, that was probably why Ashe liked it so much there. She was never asked to attend work parties, and she never told Glenn or any other coworkers about her personal life. It worked. She spent her days checking out shoppers, and when Glenn was asked about horror movies, they would get referred to her.
The day was smooth. Glenn handled everyone that came into the store, and since no one up to the mid day break had a drive for slashers, thrillers, or scares, Ashe just helped people with their purchases. By the time lunch came around, Ashe had barely left the front counter, which, in her opinion, were the best days. The boss didn’t mind if she was on her phone as long as the job got done, so she had spent plenty of time scrolling her social medias. When lunch came around, she went outside, crossed a roundabout (which were excessive in central Oregon) to a corner market to buy lunch, and went back to Glenn’s to sit out front at a bench like she did every day. When comfortable, she participated in her favorite activity of the day: Scrolling social media.
It was halfway through lunch that a sudden flicker of movement caught her attention above, but this was something that Ashe was used to. Ashe had bipolar, and one of the symptoms of her disorder that she felt went rarely discussed were visual hallucinations; A couple times a month, she would see humanoid figures appear out of the corner of her eyes. Whenever she would turn her attention towards them, they would fall apart, always. At that moment, however, it wasn’t one figure, but three that appeared, and when they fell into the middle of her gaze, they remained, standing and shuffling in the middle of the parking lot before her.
There were three people, each in formal suits, one dark blue, one light gray, and one black. Each had pushed back, jet black hair that was cut to just above their ears, and even at this distance, she could see that all of their eyes were bold gray. The ones in black and gray were holding sealed, wooden boxes with large red lettering in the side reading [WARNING: TOXIC].
The one without a box in dark blue turned to the others and muttered, “Shit. Wrong spot, sorry.” He started to make a move with his right hand towards his face, but then the one in black made a hiss, and jerked his head towards Ashe. They all froze, including Ashe, who had had a fried pickle halfway to her mouth for a good handful of moments. The one in black (TOIB) was younger than the other two by a good 15 years, and seemed around Ashe’s age. Just like Lee, he was good deal taller than her, but he had what Ashe would describe as an average, forgettable face, someone who could blend into a crowd after just a couple of seconds. He put the box that he held down onto the ground with what seemed to be some effort, then waved casually at her.
“Cold morning, huh?” He sounded tense.
Ashe looked down and dropped her pickle onto her tray. “Sure, man. What’s with the box?”
“We’re… Chemists.” He closed his eyes and quietly cursed to himself before continuing, Ashe assumed for saying something obviously fucking stupid. “We’re transporters for a local lab, these are just some chemicals. Can’t tell you more. Enjoy the, uh, bread or whatever,” and, with that, he turned back to his coworkers.
TOIB picked up his box, grunting a little as he did it with his back and not his legs, and then they quickly started marching away, heading for the nearest building which was a highway rest stop. Once there, the group walked behind it and Ashe waited for almost four full minutes to see when they would come out the other side, but they never did. Her watched showed that her lunch had ended just two minutes ago, but she needed closure, so she walked over to the spot she had last seen them. When she cleared the corner, there was no one there.
“Fuck…” she whispered to herself.
This was bad. Either she’d just had a next level hallucination, or she had seen some next level government technology, and she didn’t know which was worse. On one hand, she and her psychiatrist were potentially about to have an incredibly not fun conversation; On the other, the government’s elite might be some of the most awkward people she had seen in her entire life. To be fair, at least that awkwardness was a little comforting. She started walking back to her bench to get her unfinished lunch when she saw something on the ground where TOIB had placed his box. Ashe decided that six minutes versus eight minutes late was relatively little, so she checked and saw a small, yellow pillow bottle on the ground, label down. She rolled it over with her foot, and saw
Ashe absolutely did not do this. Instead, she decided that she was going to have a long talk with Kate, her medication manager, and walked back to gather her things. She finished out her shift, helping only two people who decided on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Throughout work, she looked out the window and consistently saw that the pill bottle was still there. Once, a truck almost ran it over, but instead the wind from the vehicle simply blew it into a safer position towards the curb. At five PM when her shift ended, she said her goodbyes to Glenn and her replacement Trish, and got in her car.
She spent ten minutes there, but something wouldn’t let her drive away. Some sense of anxiety kept gripping at her heart, telling her that something weird was going on. If that had been a hallucination, then how would there be a physical item left behind? Why a pill bottle? Why would her mind misspell please? If she picked it up, would she be engaging into a delusion, and would that be good or bad? She got out of the car. Was this a bad idea? Was this going to further her hallucinations? She had only seen figures in the corner of her eye before, this was a solid… eight? Levels above that. She walked to the bottle. She flipped it over again.
[No sersly tho, plz get me before i get run over]
Well shit, isn't that pretty alright? Don't you wanna read more? Well I have great news for you! There is more! The first three chapters are currently uploaded on my website (asheandlee.wordpress.com) and wattpad! Both of those are linked in my bio! Here's even more good news, the full book is already written, so you don't have to worry about it ever not getting finished, I have the full upload schedule already planned!
